slatestarcodex.com

Slate Star Codex (SSC) was a long-running blog by Scott Alexander that covered a wide range of subjects, with recurring themes in rationality, science and medicine, economics and political systems, and effective altruism and existential risk. The site's own blogroll and archives confirm this breadth: its link categories include Economics, Effective Altruism, Rationality, and Science, alongside a general "SSC Elsewhere" section. If you are looking for a single-issue blog, SSC is not that; if you want long-form essays that apply reasoning tools across many domains, it is a strong fit.

Rationality and cognitive biases

This was the blog's foundational theme. Posts in this area typically examined how people reason, where thinking goes wrong, and how to correct for it. Common subjects included:

• Cognitive biases and heuristics, and when they help versus mislead
• Bayesian reasoning and probabilistic thinking
• Prediction, calibration, and forecasting
• Meta-level discussions about how to run a rationalist community

The blog's audience and linked community reflect this focus: the blogroll lists Less Wrong and individual writers such as Katja Grace, Paul Christiano, and Zvi Mowshowitz under Rationality.

Science, medicine, and psychiatry

Scott Alexander's professional background in psychiatry shaped a large share of the content. Topics here included:

• Psychiatry and psychiatric medication, including debates over efficacy and side effects
• Medicine and medical research methodology, especially study design and replication
• Genetics, epidemiology, and public health
• Broader science policy and how research gets funded, published, and reported

The blogroll's Science category points to writers like Andrew Gelman, Razib Khan, Steve Hsu, and Stephan Guyenet, which matches this empirical, data-oriented strand.

Economics and political systems

SSC regularly analyzed economic ideas and institutional design rather than day-to-day politics. Recurring subjects included:

• Economic growth, regulation, and market mechanisms
• Comparative political systems and proposals for institutional reform
• Taxation, redistribution, and welfare design
• Historical and cross-country comparisons of governance

One archived post title, "Slightly Skew Systems Of Government," illustrates the style: taking a structural question about government and reasoning through variations. The Economics blogroll category includes Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, Bryan Caplan, and David Friedman.

Effective altruism and existential risk

A fourth major cluster concerned how to do the most good and how to reduce large-scale risks. Topics included:

• Effective altruism: cause prioritization, charity evaluation, and giving decisions
• Existential risk, including AI risk and other low-probability, high-impact scenarios
• Long-termism and how to weigh future generations
• Community and movement questions within effective altruism

The blogroll's Effective Altruism category lists 80,000 Hours, the Effective Altruism Forum, and the GiveWell Blog, which shows the overlap between SSC's readership and that movement.

Other recurring interests

Beyond the four main areas, SSC also carried:

• Book reviews and fiction, including Alexander's own serialized novel Unsong
• Open threads and community discussion posts
• Media criticism and commentary on online discourse
• Personal updates, including the 2020 posts about deleting the blog and the 2021 announcement of the successor site, Astral Codex Ten

How to use this if you are deciding whether to read it

• If you want rigorous, long-form essays that cross between psychology, medicine, economics, and ethics, SSC's archive is a good match.
• If you want a narrow beat—only AI, only medicine, only politics—expect to filter heavily, since topics are interleaved across the archive.
• The full archives are browsable by month from 2013 through early 2021, so you can sample by date or search by topic.
• Note that the original site stopped publishing in 2020 and the author moved to a new blog, Astral Codex Ten, announced on January 21, 2021. For current writing, follow the successor site rather than expecting new posts on slatestarcodex.com.

Slate Star Codex (SSC) was a long-running blog by Scott Alexander, and its community extended beyond the comment section into several dedicated platforms. According to the site's own navigation, the main associated spaces are an SSC Discord Server, an SSC Podcast, and an SSC Subreddit, alongside a blogroll linking to related writers and communities. These are the places where readers gathered for real-time chat, audio content, and threaded discussion.

The core community platforms

The site's homepage lists these under an "SSC Elsewhere" section, which is the clearest signal that they were treated as official extensions of the blog rather than fan-run offshoots.

Where the blogroll fits in

The blogroll is not a discussion platform itself, but it functions as a community map. It links out to blogs grouped by theme, including:

• Economics — e.g., Bryan Caplan, David Friedman, Scott Sumner, Tyler Cowen
• Effective Altruism — e.g., 80,000 Hours, the Effective Altruism Forum, GiveWell
• Rationality — e.g., Less Wrong, Gwern Branwen, Zvi Mowshowitz, Katja Grace
• Science — e.g., Andrew Gelman, Razib Khan, Scott Aaronson, Steve Hsu

For readers who wanted to follow the same conversations beyond SSC itself, the blogroll was the intended starting point.

What happened to the community after the blog was deleted

The blog was deleted in 2020, and in January 2021 Scott Alexander announced a successor blog, Astral Codex Ten, at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/. The announcement post ("Introducing Astral Codex Ten") is the primary source for where the writing moved. If you are looking for the current community, the successor blog and its associated spaces are the relevant destination; the original SSC platforms reflect the community as it existed around the blog's active period.

How to choose where to engage

• If you want threaded, searchable discussion → the SSC Subreddit.
• If you want live chat → the SSC Discord Server.
• If you prefer audio → the SSC Podcast.
• If you want to find related blogs and communities → the blogroll.
• If you want the author's current writing → Astral Codex Ten.

Slate Star Codex (slatestarcodex.com) was a long-form blog written by Scott Alexander, active from 2013 until early 2021. It published essays on rationality, science, medicine, philosophy, and social policy, and hosted an active comment community. If you are looking for the blog's original posts today, note that the site was deleted and its author moved to a new blog, Astral Codex Ten.

What the site was

Slate Star Codex was a personal blog, not a news outlet or a peer-reviewed publication. Its identity came from its author and its comment section:

• Author: Scott Alexander wrote the posts.
• Format: Long analytical essays, often several thousand words, plus open threads where readers discussed topics freely.
• Community: The site linked to a Discord server, a podcast, and a subreddit, and its comment sections were a large part of its reputation.

What it covered

The blog's topics were broad, but several recurring areas stand out:

• Rationality — reasoning, cognitive bias, and decision-making, with links to communities like Less Wrong.
• Science and medicine — analysis of research claims, including medical and psychiatric topics.
• Philosophy and ethics — including effective altruism, which appears in the site's blogroll alongside organizations like GiveWell and 80,000 Hours.
• Social and political commentary — essays on government and policy, such as "Slightly Skew Systems Of Government."

The blogroll also grouped links under Economics, Effective Altruism, Rationality, and Science, which gives a sense of the reading audience the site served.

Timeline and current status

• 2013–2021: The archive lists monthly entries from February 2013 through January 2021.
• September 2020: A post titled "Update On My Situation" describes the blog having been deleted about two and a half months earlier, amid a dispute over the author's real name.
• January 21, 2021: A post titled "Introducing Astral Codex Ten" announces the new blog at astralcodexten.substack.com.

The relevant posts are:

Where to read it now

The original slatestarcodex.com content is not the active home of the author's writing. The January 2021 post directs readers to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/, and notes that a less unwieldy domain name was planned. If your goal is to read Scott Alexander's current work, start there. If your goal is the historical Slate Star Codex archive, expect to rely on archived copies and third-party mirrors rather than the live site.

Slate Star Codex (SSC) was deleted by its author, Scott Alexander, in June 2020 after The New York Times told him it planned to publish his real name. He later relaunched the blog as Astral Codex Ten at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/. If you are looking for the old posts or wondering whether the site still exists, the short answer is: the original domain is gone, and the active successor is Astral Codex Ten.

What happened to the original blog

According to the site's own posts, Alexander removed Slate Star Codex because the Times was preparing an article that would reveal his legal name. In his post "NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog," he framed the deletion as a safety measure, not a decision to stop writing.

The timeline visible on the site:

• June 2020 – The blog is deleted.
• September 11, 2020 – Alexander posts "Update On My Situation," saying he had not heard from the Times either way and was unsure whether the article had been dropped.
• January 21, 2021 – He announces "Introducing Astral Codex Ten," pointing readers to the new Substack.

Where the content went

The successor is Astral Codex Ten, announced in the January 2021 post. The announcement says the new blog is hosted at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/, and that Alexander intended to get "a less unwieldy domain name working soon."

What carried over, based on the site's structure:

The original site also linked out to an SSC Discord server, an SSC Podcast, and an SSC Subreddit, so the community existed in several places beyond the blog itself.

What to do if you want to read it now

1. Go to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ for new posts.
2. Use the Archives on the original site's structure as a guide to what existed, but expect the old domain to be inactive.
3. For community discussion, look for the channels that were listed alongside the blog (Discord, subreddit, podcast).

Common points of confusion

• The blog was not taken down for its content. The stated reason was the planned reveal of the author's identity.
• "Deleted" does not mean "lost forever." Much of the writing was mirrored, archived, and discussed elsewhere, and the author continued publishing under the new name.
• Astral Codex Ten is not a separate project by a different person. It is the direct continuation announced by the same author.

If your goal is simply to find where the writing continues, Astral Codex Ten is the destination. If your goal is to understand why the original disappeared, the answer is the New York Times identity threat described in the author's own posts.

Slate Star Codex (SSC) was a long-running blog by Scott Alexander, and its most-read posts are collected in the site's own Top Posts section, linked from the homepage navigation. That page is the most reliable starting point, because it reflects the author's own selection rather than an external ranking. The blog itself is no longer updated at slatestarcodex.com: Alexander announced in January 2021 that his new blog is at astralcodexten.substack.com, and the archived SSC content remains available through the site's archives and Top Posts page.

Where to find the popular posts

• Top Posts — the primary curated list, accessible from the top navigation on the homepage.
• Archives — a full month-by-month index running from February 2013 through January 2021, useful if you want to browse by date rather than by popularity.
• Comments Feed / RSS Feed — for following discussion, though the blog is no longer actively posting.

Topics that dominate the popular posts

SSC's most-cited writing clusters around a few recurring subjects:

• Rationality — how to reason under uncertainty, avoid bias, and evaluate evidence.
• AI risk — long-form arguments about machine intelligence and its implications.
• Psychiatry and medicine — Alexander's professional background informed many widely shared essays.
• Politics and governance — including thought experiments about alternative systems, such as the post "Slightly Skew Systems Of Government."
• Book reviews and culture — extended reviews and essays that circulated well beyond the blog's regular readership.

Commonly cited examples

Two posts are frequently referenced in online discussions and are good entry points:

• "Meditations on Moloch" — an essay on coordination problems and why harmful equilibria persist.
• "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories" — a piece on how classification systems serve human purposes rather than reflecting fixed natural divisions.

These appear repeatedly in citations across forums, subreddits, and later blogs, which is a practical signal of their popularity even without a numeric ranking.

How to decide what to read first

A note on the site's status

The homepage currently leads with "Introducing Astral Codex Ten" (January 21, 2021), which points readers to the Substack, and with "Update On My Situation" (September 11, 2020), where Alexander explains he deleted the blog after the New York Times threatened to reveal his real name. Because of this, treat slatestarcodex.com as an archive: the Top Posts and Archives pages still work for reading, but new material appears on the Substack instead.